Quick Gameplay Thoughts: May 25

Hi folks,
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**Usual Disclaimers**
These posts will often contain talk about future work we&#039;re doing, or planning to do, that isn&#039;t yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped. If you&#039;d like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler
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**Some things we&#039;re looking at for 8.12**
A lot of our time during the 8.12 cycle is going to go to monitoring the impact of the 8.11 midseason changes and making adjustments as needed. We&#039;re also planning on doing some other work as well though, some of that below.
Gifted Shields
* Over the next few patches we&#039;ll be looking at Heals/Shields champions put on others. First thing we&#039;ll be testing, for possible inclusion in 8.12, is lowering the duration on some shields so that waiting them out&#039;s more feasible and timing for the user matters more.
Ornn
* We&#039;re potentially doing some work on Ornn. Goal there, rather than increasing or decreasing overall power, is to make him less of a safe pick when you don&#039;t yet know who he&#039;ll be facing in lane. That likely means giving him a clearer weakness enemy picks can capitalize on and giving him strength elsewhere.
Sejuani
* Sej buffs didn&#039;t make it into 8.11 since 8.10 analysis and followup ended up taking more time than expected. They should be in 8.12 instead as a result.
New AD items
* As I&#039;d imagine most of you have already seen we&#039;re working on a couple of new items that should appeal to fighters in particular. Balance and polish is still underway, expectation is we&#039;ll ship both Spear of Shojin and Atma&#039;s Reckoning in 8.12 though.
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**Pulling the Ryze and Azir investigations**
A little while back we mentioned that we were going to put less time into trying to close the regular play versus organized play divide on Ryze, Azir and Kalista so that we could put more time into other champs. Before that came into effect we wanted to try some changes we&#039;d been discussing for Ryze and Azir for a while. Those showed some promise, but also looked like they&#039;d require a fair bit more work to ship, with likelihood of some additional followup being needed too. We&#039;re iceboxing those changes as a result and won&#039;t be working on anything for those three champs that isn&#039;t just a regular balance adjustment for a fair while.
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**Bounty Changes and Average Position Income**
In addition to concentrating gold on specific champions (more solo carry/individual snowball, but less team snowball) the 8.10 bounty changes also resulted in a slight decrease in average gold income in every position since that change decreased overall bounty gold in the system. Breakdown of that below for anyone interested. As you&#039;d expect higher income loss happens in positions that tend to have less kill focused champs in them since they were hit hardest by the loss of team-wide bounties (enchanters/tanks in support, tanks/split pushers in top).
Average change in 8.10 versus 8.9 at 35 minutes:
Top -325
Mid -260
Jungle -250 (though with very high variance from that average depending on the champion in question)
Bot -250
Support -420
That gold loss is low enough we don&#039;t have immediate plans to counteract it, especially given we&#039;ve increased income a bit over time in other ways, so pulling a bit out&rsquo;s reasonable. Will be watching it though, in particular to see if it pushes power spikes for particular positions or champs back too far in some cases.
http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png

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